Personal Research Journey

 

When we started the reflection on research, I knew that my deficit would lie on narrowing down a workable research topic. The following is the list of the 3 subtopics I had thought about to respond to this general topic “Improving immigrants’ participation in their children’s school life”:

How is poverty and legal status responsible for a lack of involvement in school?

What can schools and educators do to better understand each of their families’ culture, values, and their relationship with education?

How can schools promote better parent involvement? 

 

Thanks to the professor’s feedback, I understand that questions need to be carefully crafted to reduce the scope of the research, in other words making research possible. According to Mac Naughton, Rolfe, & Siraj-Blatchford (2010), reviewing what has already been written on the topic will highlight the question that will develop previous research and benefit children and their families. Studying the existing literature will help:

“identify gaps in knowledge, and contradictions and disagreements about what is known about the topic

identify areas of uncertainty, puzzlement or confusion in what is known” (Mac Naughton, Rolfe, &Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).

       In addition of being well-encapsulated, the research question must also seek to bring new insights to a topic and not “unknowingly replicate other people’s research” (Mac Naughton, Rolfe, &Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).

        With this in mind, I need to reformulate my question to prepare the research. I also need to craft the question and stay true to my initial interest concerning immigrant families and their children.  Question 2 has several advantages such as:

encapsulating the idea of immigration as it relates to families and children

narrowing the scope of research to practical actions schools and educators could take to better understand their families

promoting a better relationship between school and parents.

 

    Surely, this question will continue to change as the course takes us further in our investigation and as my colleagues offer their feedback.

    Since I teach Spanish to kindergarteners through to 8^th graders, I would greatly benefit from my colleagues’ expertise in preschoolers and their families, especially immigrant families or where one parent was not born in the U.S. I am interested in how children’s social-emotional balance is affected by the impact of immigration in their lives. I would love to glean information on how parents understand their relationship with their children’s teachers and school. I would greatly appreciate if my colleagues could talk about the quality of the relationship they hold with their parents and if they could share with me their thoughts on why it is so.

            Finally, here are four articles that I downloaded from the Walden Library that I plan to use for my simulation research:

DOUCET, F. (2011). Parent Involvement as Ritualized Practice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 42(4), 404-421. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2011.01148.x

HAMILTON, H. A., MARSHALL, L., RUMMENS, J. A., FENTA, H., & SIMICH, L. (2011). Immigrant Parents' Perceptions of School Environment and Children's Mental Health and Behavior. Journal Of School Health, 81(6), 313-319. doi:10.1111/j.1746-1561.2011.00596.x

Yu, S. M., & Singh, G. K. (2012). High Parenting Aggravation Among US Immigrant Families. American Journal Of Public Health, 102(11), 2102-2108. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300698

Clair, L. t., Jackson, B., & Zweiback, R. (2012). Six Years Later: Effect of Family Involvement Training on the Language Skills of Children From Migrant Families. School Community Journal, 22(1), 9-19.

Reference

 Mac Naughton, G., Rolfe, S.A., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). Doing early childhood research: International perspectives on theory and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.